


Smoke

by Comatosejoy



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blank Period, Break Up, Complete, F/M, Hunting, Post-Break Up, Romance, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:14:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23641429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Comatosejoy/pseuds/Comatosejoy
Summary: "Occasionally she’d lift a cigarette to her lips just to remember what it tasted like to kiss him. And when she did, she’d immediately regret it. Everything would hit her at once.  Her stomach would drop and she’d feel the hair stand up on the back of her neck. It was amazing that he could still have this effect on her."Shikamaru breaks up with Temari. Angst with a happy ending. A three-part story.
Relationships: Nara Shikamaru/Temari
Comments: 33
Kudos: 106





	1. Chapter 1

Temari has never taken up smoking. The only reason she would have would be to piss off Rasa, and he was long dead by the time it ever occurred to her. Now, though, she walks down the street to Suna’s specialty tobacco shop to buy those cigarettes they sell in Konoha. She’d been lighting them during the day, letting them smolder in the ashtray on her porch. An ashtray she’d intended to give him for his birthday the following month. She had looked wistfully at the thin trail of smoke and imagined that he was just around the corner. She’d picture his wiry frame, his stupid, unruly hair, and his crooked smirk and she'd ache a little. 

Occasionally she’d lift a cigarette to her lips and remember what it tasted like to kiss him. And when she did, she’d immediately regret it. Everything would hit her at once. How he’d go outside and smoke after they’d made love. How she sort of liked the way the smell would drift into her bedroom. How she found it comforting and distinctive. Her stomach would drop and she’d feel the hair stand up on the back of her neck. It was amazing that he could still have this effect on her. 

“A pack of Konoha Reds,” she says. The shopkeeper recognizes her. How could he not?

“Ah, is your consort coming to town, Lady Temari?” 

It wasn’t the man’s fault he didn’t know, but Temari narrows her eyes all the same.

“No,” she says, and there’s something hard in her voice that informs the shopkeeper not to ask her anything further. 

When she arrives back at her home, she peels the cellophane off of the pack and pulls a cigarette out to light it. The smoke gets in her eyes, causing her to tear up. The tears don’t stop, and she grimaces. _It’s just the smoke,_ she tells herself. It’s a lie. 

She replays the events in her head over and over like some torturous looped video. 

“You can’t leave Suna and I can’t leave Konoha,” he’d said one day when she was waiting to meet with the Hokage. “How is this going to work?” 

“It’s been working so far,” she had answered dismissively. 

Two weeks later, he had been in Suna and caught wind of suitors. Men who Rasa had been vetting as potential matches for his daughter. Men who were very much still interested in courting the princess. 

“I don’t pay them any mind and neither should you,” she had said. “Gaara would never make me marry any of those clowns.” 

She watched him clench his jaw. _How cute, he’s jealous,_ she had thought amusedly. 

“Have you noticed that you’ve never said ‘I love you’ back to me?” Shikamaru had asked the next time they were together. 

“Okay, I love you,” she had said, not bothering to glance up from her book. Again, her tone was dismissive. She thought he was being a child. Of course she loved him. She wouldn’t spend her nights in his bed when she was in Konoha if she didn’t. She wouldn’t wake him up from his nightmares and bear witness to his pain if she didn’t. And she certainly wouldn’t have just entertained the thought of what he’d just said if she didn’t. 

“That doesn’t sound very sincere,” he said, but he dropped it. 

The next day, she’d been packing, about to depart for home. 

“You can’t leave Suna and I can’t leave Konoha,” he said, repeating the words he’d said a month earlier. 

It all clicked together. He’d been trying to do this all this time. All the times he’d tried to start this conversation rushed into her mind. She turned around to look him in the eye. He’d known when she’d slept in his bed last night, when she’d crawled into his lap and sunk him into her. He’d known when they’d had dinner weeks ago with her brothers. Who knows how long ago he’d made this decision. There must have been something terrifying in her eyes as she came to her realization because he backed away a fraction of an inch.

“What are you saying?” Temari asked. Her voice was a growl. 

“I think you already know what I’m saying.” 

She’d never taken him for a coward. She scrutinized him. His face was expressionless and he met her gaze. 

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. His voice cracked, betraying that blank face he was able to put on only because he was such a good shinobi. 

“Don’t be,” she had said. She was able to keep her voice level. Because she was better than him. 

“Let me walk you to the gate,” he offered. 

“I know the way,” she said. There was nothing biting in her tone and she did that intentionally. She knew the more civil she acted the more infuriated he’d be. And she wasn’t above pissing him off at that very moment. 

She wonders, now, if she should have argued with him. If his decision was really that solid. But she’s above convincing someone who doesn’t want her to stick around. And she knows that you can’t force anyone to stay in a relationship with you. 

Kankurō knocks on her door. 

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says. 

“I’m not in the mood,” she answers. 

“Get some air,” Gaara says, appearing next to their brother, and the concern she sees flicker over his face is enough to draw her out of her room but not out of her grief.

She trudges through the brush on the outskirts of Suna, Kankurō a step in front of her. They don’t speak and she prefers it that way. Just a few days before, she hadn’t been able to get him to stop talking about the things he was going to do to the Nara.

She crouches down, sensing something about half a klick northwest of them. It’s a mule deer. They rarely venture this close to the sand out of the scrubland, and she grasps her brother’s arm. If she were more sentimental, she’d take its appearance as a sign to fight for the relationship that Shikamaru had decided to end. But she isn’t the sentimental type. It’s not even the same subspecies that her former lover raises. No, she isn’t sentimental. She prefers scorched earth. She wants to throw away everything in her home that he’s touched. Something occurs to her. 

“What do you think of venison for dinner?” Temari asks quietly. 

Kankurō grins, and she bites her thumb and draws her weapon. Before the animal could even register fear, it was dead. Its herd, farther west, sees it collapse and takes off into the distance.

She skins and cleans the deer herself. When everything is said and done, she doesn’t want to eat it. She leaves the butchered meat with her brother. She thought renouncing Shikamaru in such a powerful way would make her feel better, but she still feels like she’s physically breaking. Her heart did not harden like she had thought it would. There was no catharsis, no realization that she’d be better off without him. 

She cuts her hair that night, suddenly wanting everything about her appearance to be different. She doesn’t want to be the kunoichi he recognizes. She wishes he could forget her touch and she his. She decides that she loathes him. And, in spite of her decision, when she returns to her room, she lights another cigarette. She feels tears run down her cheek. 

“Smoke in my eyes again,” she says despite being upwind. 

When she has to return to Konoha, after putting it off for months, he isn’t at the gates to greet her. She chastises herself. Why the hell would he be? 

She goes out for drinks with the kunoichi she’d gotten to know in her time working on the Shinobi Union. She hears from Ino that he’s seeing someone else. She can tell that Ino is gauging her reaction and so she keeps her face unreadable and changes the subject. 

But she’s still thinking about it. She wonders if he takes this new woman to that lake on the Nara compound at midnight. She wonders if this new woman kisses him under the moon and inches closer to him in the tepid water. She wonders if he uses the same moves on this woman. If he runs his thumb over her nipple as they kiss languidly. It makes her sick to her stomach to consider him with anyone else. When she returns to her apartment, the thought of him looking at this new woman from under his eyelashes overwhelms her. She vomits.

“Too much to drink,” she mutters to herself. She’d only had one cup of sake that evening. 

The next day, she waits at the base of the Hokage Tower. It’s where dignitaries traditionally wait, though in the past she’d always shown herself upstairs. But she’s feeling mean and petty and she wants to make Shikamaru fetch her. 

“Temari,” she hears him say after a long while, and she suspects that he made her wait because he, too, is petty. 

“Yes, _Lord Nara_?” Temari answers pointedly. She sees a glint of annoyance on his face and can practically hear the _troublesome_ run through his mind. But he recovers quickly. 

“Lord Sixth is ready for you now,” he says, beckoning her to follow. 

She stares at the back of the neck that she’d once kissed tenderly. She’s done a very good job of taking the love she felt in her heart and molding it into hatred. The last time she had kissed that neck so tenderly, he had already decided that he didn’t want her. What a fool he made out of her. Her eyes burn holes into his back. 

“You changed your hair,” he comments, not turning to look at her. 

She bites back the _Nothing gets past you,_ choosing instead to not respond. 

When she enters the Hokage’s office, Shikamaru leans lazily in the doorway. She doesn’t much like that and quickly performs a few hand signs. There’s a crash from Shikamaru’s office. 

“Sounds like the wind might have knocked over your bookshelves, Lord Nara,” she says innocently. He eyes her and makes his way out the room. 

For his part, Kakashi is more amused than anything else and doesn’t mention the incident as he hands her papers to deliver to Gaara and outlines an agreement he wants Konoha and Suna to present jointly. When it’s time for her to leave, he raises an eyebrow. 

“Would you like an escort to your apartment?” 

“Oh no, I wouldn’t want to bother your assistant,” she says sweetly. “I think quite a few of his valuables may have broken. I can’t tear him away from cleaning that up.” 

She turns to leave. She hears a soft chuckle from the Hokage as she does, and when she rounds the corner, he calls out to Shikamaru. 

“She’s scary when she isn’t mad. I’d suggest you fix whatever you did to her.” 

When she’s in her Konoha apartment, she is lachrymose. She’d acted immaturely back there. She shouldn’t have given in to her emotions like that. Shikamaru made her blood run hot. Before, it had been the heat of passion. Now, it was fury. She couldn’t help herself. She should apologize for what she did. 

She feels his chakra before he knocks on her door. 

She opens it, and he’s slouching casually before her. 

“You broke my Shogi board.” 

_You broke my heart_ , she doesn’t say. Instead, she laughs. It’s a mirthless, terrible sound that surprises even her. All thoughts she had of contrition vanish as she sees him. He looks so relaxed. He looks like this is easy for him. It makes her so angry that she’d break a thousand Shogi boards and hunt a thousand deer. She moves to close the door in his face, but his foot catches it. 

“We don’t have to be friends, but I think we should be civil. We still work together,” he says. 

She glares at him. “Kindly remove your foot from my door frame, Lord Nara,” she says poisonously. 

“I’m trying here, Tem,” he pleads. She hears that cruel laugh escape her mouth again, and she’s pushing him out into the street, her finger on his chest. 

“Oh? I guess trying looks different for me. See, when I’m trying at something, I don’t make unilateral decisions for other people.” 

Before she realizes what’s happening, her fan is drawn and she sends him a foot back in a teasing gust of wind like a cat playing with a mouse. She feels as though a long-healed wound has been cut back open, and out of this gash spills all her cruelty and rage. 

“When I try, I don’t lie.” She moves to whisper in his ear. “I don’t fuck someone for a month under false pretenses.” 

She knocks his feet from under him and he’s on his knees. 

“I don’t show up to make amends only after I’ve been inconvenienced,” she says, her fan raised high above her arms. She brings it down in a final blow that would have knocked him out and sent him careening out of her sight, only to be caught midair by his shadow. 

Her face twitches. “Let me go.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says. 

She realizes that there have been tears running down her face, landing on his shoulder beneath her. He releases her. 

She turns around, hearing the click of his lighter. She smells that familiar tobacco. 

“Smoke must have gotten in my eye,” she says weakly, walking the three steps back into her apartment and locking the door behind her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said that this is a two-part story, but I realized that the correct way to end it would be to split the second part into two chapters. Thank you for your patience, and thank you all for your kind reviews.

Shiho is no great beauty, but that’s fine by Shikamaru. He’d never really cared much about looks. She’s a decent Shogi opponent. Their brains work similarly and when she’s about to make a move on the board, he sees the mechanisms turning in her mind before she chooses the most logical strategy. She isn’t fussy or argumentative. She doesn’t place any expectations on him and that pairs well with his lazy demeanor. But most importantly, she lives a five minute walk away from him and she’s interested. She’s a pragmatic choice. And he’s nothing if not pragmatic. 

So he tries to ignore his annoyance when she blushes and stammers near him. He tries to mask his relief at the fact that she is only ever forward enough to place a peck on his cheek after he walks her home. And though he has a litany of excuses ready to turn her down if she asks him to come inside, he’s glad he hasn’t had to use them yet. They’ve been seeing each other for a month now, though, and she has become bolder. Her pecks are getting ever-closer to his lips when she bids him farewell at the close of their evenings and he dreads the day he has to taste her. 

Before asking her out, he’d done his research. Of most arranged marriages, because that’s the closest thing he had to compare what he was doing to, the couples learn to love each other over time. The more often you see someone, too, the more fond you become of them. So he increases the frequency of their meetings, trying to trick his brain into feeling something. He resigns himself to it. This is what he’s chosen: practicality over desire. 

He had breathed a grateful sigh when Temari sent a proxy to their next meeting, despite the fact that it seemed like she had sent the most incompetant person in Suna just to spite him. Seeing her would throw a wrench into his process. She would have obliterated any sense of resolve he had. That’s why it had taken him so fucking long to end it in the first place. The second he looked at her, his stupid, troublesome love for her overrode any decisions he had made when his brain was working properly. 

But once she put the pieces together after one of his many cowardly attempts, he was miserable. He wanted to take it all back. But there was no going back. For someone who could predict things down to the very second, for someone who carefully measured risk against reward, for someone who considers all outcomes, he realized he’d made a serious miscalculation. He didn’t expect it to hurt like it did. His idiotic, traitorous heart twisted hideously in his chest cavity. 

_This was for the best_ , he reminded himself as she looked at him carefully. Temari had a life in Suna, responsibilities and citizens to look after. And he belonged to Konoha with every ounce of his being. The Will of Fire that coursed through his veins was not something he could forsake. He could not pack up his things and make a life in the sand anymore than she could pack up her things and make a life in the leaves. 

She left his house without looking back. He thinks, if the situation were reversed, he’d look back to see if she was watching him. To see if she had regret in those damned green eyes. But she’s always been better than him. More disciplined. If she doesn’t want you to know how she feels, you won’t find out.

For weeks after he let her go, he’d find things that made him crumble around the house. He went to adjust his pillow one night to discover one of her long, blonde hairs coiled on the pillowcase. It ruined him. He hated all these fucking ghosts of her, hidden throughout his house like landmines. On his best day, he could walk through his house without a thought. But on his worst, he’d imagine how he’d bent her over the kitchen counter as he walked past it. He’d trod past the Shogi board in his room and think of the time she fell asleep over it during a game, the rook piece sticking to her cheek and leaving an indentation when she awoke. He’d think of all the ways they fucked and fought and made up and touched and talked and fucked again scattered around the layout of his home. It was maddening enough to make him want to tear up the floorboards. Raze his house entirely, even. And if Temari had had even a slightly more powerful influence over him, or if he weren’t so lazy, he might have. 

He saw Gaara far before he saw Temari, at a Kage summit in Kumo. It was unusual to see the Kazekage sans his siblings. 

“The princess sends her regards,” he said by way of explanation to Kakashi. 

During a break in the meeting, Shikamaru had tried to make his way to the restroom. He didn’t get far before feeling someone stop him from behind.

“I should thank you,” Gaara had said, his hand heavy upon Shikamaru’s shoulder. Shikamaru froze under the weight of it and turned to face him.

“Oh?” Shikamaru asked, his voice far more neutral than he felt. He had seen Gaara at his most unstable, quaking with a thirst for blood. And yet this calm approach the Kazekage was using was far scarier. 

“Yes. After you broke my sister’s heart, she went out and killed a deer,” he said. 

“Okay,” Shikamaru responded uncertainly, not at all liking where this was going. 

“Now I have a handsome pelt in my office,” Gaara continued. “And do you know what I think about when I look at that pelt?” 

Shikamaru did not respond. He noted, with a pang of sadness, that Gaara and Temari had the same nose. The same chin. The same delicate bone structure. It made him want to look away. When he did, Gaara saw it as an invitation to continue. 

“I think about how if anyone hurts my family, I won’t think twice about killing them. Ally or no.” 

Gaara grasped Shikamaru’s shoulder a little tighter and gave him a shake. To a casual observer, the gesture would have looked friendly. But Shikamaru saw the restraint in Gaara’s movement and could tell how close he was to being thrown across the room. 

“It was fantastic speaking with you, Lord Nara,” he said, his tone suddenly diplomatic, and Shikamaru realized that someone was within earshot of them. It occurred to him that it was a mercy on Gaara’s part that he hadn’t brought Kankurō. Kankurō wasn’t one for quiet, albeit _terrifying_ , threats. He was one for action. And Shikamaru probably wouldn’t win in a fight against the puppetmaster. 

“I think you’re mistaken, Lord Kazekage,” Shikamaru said, equally as cordially. “I only did what was best for Suna. And for Konoha.” 

“I am not the one who has made a mistake, Lord Nara,” Gaara said darkly before moving to speak to a different diplomat as though nothing had happened. _Sunans always need to have the last word_ , he thought absently. 

When he finally sees her for the first time in months, she undoes him. Her hair is much shorter and his mind flits back to that strand of her hair he’d found all those months ago that had pained him so much. The fact that she’d changed something about herself, even though it was a minute physical change, serves to remind him that he does not know Temari anymore. 

“Temari,” he says, and hates himself for acting so familiar with her. 

“Yes, Lord Nara?” Temari responds. It hurts. The formality. The way she spits his name out of her mouth like it’s a rotten piece of fruit she’d mistakenly bitten into. The fact that what they had is gone, that he’ll never hear her moan _Shika_ as she grips his bedsheets. That he’s Lord Nara to her now. 

“Lord Sixth is ready for you now,” he says, keeping his tone as formal and controlled as hers had just been. He tries to make polite conversation and is fully ignored. 

He slouches into Kakashi’s office behind the princess, and she looks at him standing there casually with something irate flashing across her eyes. Before he can fully understand what she’s weaving, he heards wood smashing against wood from down the hall. 

“Sounds like the wind might have knocked over your bookshelves, Lord Nara,” Temari says. _Yes, that pesky indoor wind,_ Shikamaru thinks as he narrows his eyes and wordlessly stalks out to assess the damage. 

Yurito gapes at the wreckage in the office. He had barely touched the bookcase before it had toppled over onto his boss’s Shogi board. There was no way to salvage either of them. 

Shikamaru enters just as Yurito’s shock had morphed into guilt. 

“I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I did,” Yurito scrambled to provide an explanation. Shikamaru would have laughed if he weren’t so annoyed and, despite his better judgement, decides to use Yurito’s assumption that this was somehow his fault to his advantage. 

“Just clean it up,” he says, slumping down in his chair and massaging his temples tiredly. 

That evening, he goes to make peace and is nearly killed for it. There were several errors that had brought him to his current position, on his knees in front of an infuriated Sunan royal whose fan is raised above her head and whose intent to kill could be perceived for kilometers. 

He should have anticipated that she’d been thinking about the breakup just as much as he had. Temari isn’t someone to just forgive an offense. And she’d thought about it long enough to detest him. It was fair, he supposed. He had, as she said, made a unilateral decision. 

He had not sensed the weather shifting, and the raindrops that hit his face and shoulders startle him. Even more startling is when he realizes that it isn’t raining at all. That the source of the moisture was Temari, standing over him, as menacing and beautiful as ever, and weeping.

“I’m sorry,” is all he can think to say, and he’s so shocked by her tears that he breaks the jutsu quite by accident. 

She looks at him with some kind of disdain. A disdain he now realizes that he has earned. She turns away from him. Shaking, not knowing what to do with his hands, and still on his knees, he pulls a cigarette out of his pack and lights it. 

“Smoke must have gotten in my eye,” he hears her mutter before disappearing inside her apartment. 

And he finds his own eyes pricking with tears. “Mine too,” he says. 

The next morning, he wakes to a box on his porch. Things he left at Temari’s Konoha apartment. The things he left in Suna, he reasons, are likely in cinders or smithereens. And because he’s weak, he brings the box in and sifts through it. Everything in the box is freezing as though it’s been sitting outside for hours and he deduces that she must have left well before sunrise.

He finds an old shirt of his that she had used to sleep in. He brings it to his nose and inhales deeply. A noise catches in his throat, reacting to her scent which still lingers in the fibers as though her essence had been sewn into the very fabric. He has willfully stepped on a landmine after months of diligently creeping around them. And he knows what he must do as he hears that fateful _click_ beneath his feet.


	3. Chapter 3

One day it won’t hurt to look at him. Just like how it doesn’t hurt anymore to gaze upon the Hokage carved into the face of the cliff and know that it’s where her father died. One day those hot, embarrassing tears will run dry. Maybe Shikamaru won’t notice when she stops hurting. She’ll continue her obligations to Konoha like usual. She has to stop sending that proxy, afterall. 

She had made good time that day. Unable to sleep, she left in the middle of the night. And though she was weighed down by emotional and physical exhaustion, she got to her usual camp spot in the middle of the afternoon. If she got a good night’s sleep, she might be able to surprise her brothers by coming home early. 

She imagines, as she lounges on her bedroll, what it will feel like the bright and beautiful morning when she will feel nothing for him. Her pulse won’t raise an iota as she meets his intelligent, dark eyes in the Hokage Tower. And if he makes her wait for an hour at the base of the Hokage Tower, or if he slouches against the wall disinterestedly while she’s around, or if he talks to her like he never loved her, it won’t feel like a kunai piercing her as it had this time around. 

Someday, she’ll be in Konoha for one of their famous festivals. Maybe Shikamaru will be married to that woman he’s dating by then. She’ll get to see fireworks over the Hokage’s stony faces and she will not cry because of Shikamaru nor will she cry because of her father. She’ll watch the sky like a sobbing chest as it convulses with sparks and fire and darkness. If she sucks in her breath to cry, it will be in solidarity with the sky. It will not be because of the men who hurt her. 

And maybe she should finally give in and give one of those suitors the time of day. Find the most palatable. One who is quiet, one who is kind. She imagines getting married to him. He’s faceless and silent, dressed like a dignitary. He will never really love her, not in the way she needs. But she will not love him either. And they will never acknowledge that truth.

Those fucking tears are back and exhausting enough to make her fall into a dreamless slumber.

When she jolts awake, it’s fully dark. It’s late winter, so she can’t be sure how long she’s been asleep given how early the sun sets. She does know, however, that someone approximately three klicks east of her location is heading directly toward her at a breakneck pace. She can’t get a sense of the chakra, but it’s rare that a friend approaches you so pointedly. 

She hides her own chakra and scurries up to the thinnest branches of the trees above. She sits comfortably up there, with a good view of her campsite and her wind jutsu keeping her from falling. There, she closes her eyes and concentrates enough to recognize the chakra signature from this far away. Her eyes fly open.

She lands just as Shikamaru emerges from the treeline.

“You have some nerve coming here,” she says, and for the first time, he has the decency to look sheepish. 

“Listen,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck and looking away. “I fucked up.” 

She waits for him to say more, but nothing else comes. So she laughs. She laughs at the ridiculousness of it all. She laughs at the fact that he travelled so far to say so little. She laughs because he sounded so nervous. 

“Marry me,” he says, and she laughs harder. She doubles over, clutching her stomach. She imagines the look on Gaara’s face when she returns to Suna and says _Surprise, I’m engaged_. 

“Damn it, woman. Stop laughing and answer me,” he says, and she can hear the anxiety in his voice. It’s cruel to keep him hanging like this, and she tries to calm herself. 

“Okay,” she finally breathes, wiping away a tear. 

“Okay?” Shikamaru asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“Okay,” she nods, her laughter having subsided. She takes his hand and brings it to her cheek. He runs his thumb over her mouth and smiles Even in the darkness, she can see the relief in his eyes. 

“Okay.”


End file.
